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Extreme Networks, Inc. (EXTR)

Q3 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, May 1, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Extreme Networks Third Fiscal Quarter 2013 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, John Kurtzweil, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, you may begin.

John T. Kurtzweil

Analyst

Thank you, Sam. Welcome to the Extreme Networks Fiscal 2013 Third Quarter Conference Call. On the call with me today from Extreme Networks is Chuck Berger, President and CEO. David Ginsburg, SVP Product Line Management and Chief Operating Officer, is on the call with us as well. This conference call is being broadcast live over the Internet and is being recorded on behalf of the company. The recording will be posted on the Extreme Networks' website for a replay shortly after the conclusion of the call and will remain there for 7 days. The presentations and recording of this call are copyrighted property of the company, and no other recording or reproduction is permitted unless authorized by the company in writing. This afternoon, Extreme Networks issued a press release announcing the company's financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2013. A copy of the release and supporting financial materials are available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.extremenetworks.com. This conference call contains forward-looking statements and involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding the company's expectations regarding the financial performance, the impact of its restructuring efforts, strategies, growth of customer demand, development of new products, customer acceptance of the company's products, customer buying patterns and spending patterns, and overall trends and economic conditions in the company's markets. Actual results could differ materially from these projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including, but not limited to, a challenging macroeconomic environment worldwide; fluctuations in demand for the company's products and services; a highly competitive business environment for network switching equipment; the company's effectiveness in controlling expenses, including the company's cost restructuring efforts; the possibility that the company might experience delays in the development of new technologies and products; customer response to its…

Charles W. Berger

Analyst

Thank you, John, and welcome, everyone to our third quarter fiscal conference call earnings release. As you know, this is day 3 for me at Extreme Networks. Therefore, I will let John Kurtzweil drive this call for review of the financial results. And I have also asked Dave Ginsburg, Senior VP, Product Line Management and Chief Marketing Officer, to cover the market and business discussions. I do want to share with you what attracted me to Extreme and where my key areas of focus have been since day 1, short 2 days ago. Extreme has always been known for its leading edge, competitive technology at the high end of the market. As the upcoming business discussion reveals, our product direction has been rationalized and has gained increased traction in the marketplace in the form of customer acceptance and analyst plaudits. We have a significant global installed base of existing customers. That said, the disappointing operating results of the past few quarters clearly point to a need for better execution across the board. I am confident that given our technology strength, our strong product portfolio, our incredibly strong balance sheet and our talented team of people, we can deliver better execution and therefore, better results in the near term. Frankly, I see this for the entire company and for our shareholders as a highly unique opportunity where there are many positive leverage points. I want to reiterate the commitment of our board, the management team and the entire staff to focus on driving meaningful, positive revenue growth and towards increasing margins. I can think of no better way than that to drive increased shareholder value. With $189 million in cash and no debt, we certainly have the financial strength to back our efforts. I will now turn the call back over to John.

John T. Kurtzweil

Analyst

Thank you, Chuck. I will now provide a review of our financial -- of our fiscal Q3 financials, our business results and our financial targets for our fiscal Q4. We will then open the call for Q&A. Revenues for Q3 in fiscal 2013 were $68.2 million, which fell short of our guidance of $70 million to $75 million. Sequentially, revenues were down from Q2 by $7.3 million or 9.7% and down $15.1 million or 6.5% year-over-year. Orders came late in the quarter and the mix was different than forecasted, which led to inventory shortages against the orders actually placed. The book-to-bill ratio was approximately 1.1 for the quarter, and we entered our fourth fiscal quarter with a healthy backlog. Product revenues were $54.1 million, a decrease of $6.2 million sequentially. Service revenues were $14.1 million, a decrease of $1.1 million sequentially. Americas revenue were $28 million and down $5.5 million or 16.3% from Q2 FY '13. South America was a primary contributor to the decline of revenues as expected due to this time of year being the time for their summer vacations. Further, we typically enjoy -- experience lumpy revenues from this region based on the deals and the deal size that we are pursuing. EMEA revenues were $28.5 million and were down slightly $0.2 million or 1% from Q2 FY '13. Southern Europe, including the Middle East, were the weakest regions, with the strongest results in the Eastern block. Asia Pacific revenues were $11.7 million, down $1.6 million or 12.4% sequentially from Q2 FY '13. China and Australia and New Zealand were the weakest regions, with solid performance coming out of Korea. This is a typical down quarter for this region with Chinese New Year and summer vacation season in the Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia and New Zealand.…

David Ginsburg

Analyst

Thank you, John. During the quarter, we reaffirmed our position as the technology leader providing switching infrastructure for those customers requiring the combination of performance and highly competitive total cost of ownership. We believe we have managed our restructuring efforts to allow us to continue to maintain our technology lead. Two public test events helped validate our engineering execution. First, EANTC in Europe sponsors yearly interoperability testing targeted at service providers. They validated our industry-leading timing and synchronization solutions for mobile backhaul and tested SDN-delivered OpenFlow. It was the first time vendor implementations were held to a set test plan, and we proved our ability to operate within a multi-vendor environment. Second, in the U.S., we once again participated in Lippis Report testing. As you may remember, in the fall of 2011, we announced that our BlackDiamond X8 data center switch had demonstrated best-in-class throughput, latency and per-port power consumption. At the time, we also tested our Summit X670, 10 gig, 40 gig, top-of-rack switch for the same characteristics. In January of this year, Lippis conducted the first ever active data center fabric test. In the presence of strong competition, the combination of our BDX and our X670 demonstrated best-in-class fabric latency, predictability and resiliency. Basically, we have the best independently tested open fabric offerings in the industry. Our overall data center strategy was also recognized by Forrester by designating Extreme Networks as a strong performer in their January 2013 Forrester Wave. The placement is based on a combination of products, customer traction, vision and partnerships. We share this distinction with a number of vendors who are substantially larger than us. After the end of the quarter, we achieved VSPEX certification that validates the role of our switch as part of a partner-led block architecture. This, in combination with our…

John T. Kurtzweil

Analyst

Thank you, Dave. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013 ending June 30, 2013, we are targeting revenue in the range of $73 million to $77 million, with GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins targeted to be between 54% and 55%. For both GAAP and non-GAAP, R&D expenses are targeted to be sequentially flat. Sales and marketing expenses are targeted to increase by $0.5 million to $1 million depending upon the revenue levels. G&A expenses, on a GAAP basis, are targeted to increase by approximately $1.1 million, and on a non-GAAP basis, they are targeted to be sequentially flat. Restructuring charges are targeted to be $0.5 million. Interest income and other expense are targeted to be approximately $0.2 million, and tax expense targeted to be approximately $0.5 million. GAAP net income is targeted at $1 million to $4 million or $0.01 to $0.04 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income is targeted in a range of $4 million to $7 million or $0.04 to $0.08 per diluted share. The GAAP and non-GAAP net income targets are based on an estimated 92.5 million diluted weighted average shares. Targeted non-GAAP earnings exclude expenses related to stock-based compensation expense of approximately $1.6 million, restructuring charges of approximately $0.5 million and $1.1 million of one-time CEO transition expenses. For those of you who are building financial models on the company, we are targeting a quarterly financial model with a goal of achieving non-GAAP gross margin of 56% plus or minus, and for non-GAAP operating income of 10%, plus or minus, at a revenue level just below the $80 million mark per quarter. To help achieve this goal, the company remains focused on growing its revenue with higher performing, lower-cost products, as well as further realigning its cost structure around the set of products. We will now open the call for questions. Sam, can you start the polling, please?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Christian Schwab of Craig-Hallum Capital.

Christian D. Schwab - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC, Research Division

Analyst

Chuck, welcome to Extreme Networks. In your vast few days at the company, just wondering what some of these many positive leverage points that you think are unique to Extreme are, if you could highlight some of those for us?

Charles W. Berger

Analyst

Christian, I look forward to meeting you in person and I'd be happy to do that again, tempered with 2 full days on the job. As I said in my opening remarks, I think we have a number of leverage points. The first and foremost, is our core technology backed by 180 patents and patents pending that if you listen carefully to Dave's remarks, are pulling us into a number of leading edge application areas, which are just starting to produce revenue and I think creates an enormous leverage point for us as we go into the future. The technology and the products backed by a strong team of people, but a team of people, frankly, who need help in executing better and working better across functional lines as the entire company and as a team. We certainly have a strong group of customers and are getting better and better at getting repeat business from those customers, an area I think that where we have a lot of leverage that we can improve on. Our focus on -- is our ongoing service revenues from those customers. I've met a lot of good people, I've got a lot of people to go to meet, but we have a strong people who have committed themselves to Extreme, in many cases over a long career, which is clearly a leverage point. And finally, we have a strong balance sheet with nearly $200 million in cash and no debt. We have the resources to not only look inward to expand our technology base and improve our execution, but longer term, if we see appropriate. Other technologies that we might like to acquire, we have the financial strength to do that. And I'm very excited about the collection of those in terms of what, I think, we can produce going forward in terms of a stronger company and increased shareholder value.

Christian D. Schwab - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC, Research Division

Analyst

Great. John, are you in a position yet where you can break out what your quarterly revenue was this quarter in the 10 and 40-gig products?

John T. Kurtzweil

Analyst

Well, based on our product revenue, it's pretty similar to last quarter but down just a little bit. And what we saw were that some of the orders that I mentioned earlier that came in later in the quarter were -- we were inventory constrained due to mix was related to those products. So it was down just a tad, and the backlog looks like it should be up next quarter.

Christian D. Schwab - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC, Research Division

Analyst

And when you guys look at the large data center, cloud revenue opportunities, did you close any deals in the $500,000 plus category? And in your book-to-bill, which is very healthy at 1.1, are there some larger $500,000 to $2 million deals in that, that need to be closed in June?

John T. Kurtzweil

Analyst

Yes, there's -- we always have deals that are in that range. Last quarter, we had a couple of deals that closed that were over $1 million, that are in the backlog, that we'll be delivering on this quarter. So we expect to be able to continue. Part of where that comes from is as we get more and more into the data center, we're able to provide the data center products, as well as some of the edge products as well. And that's helping the breadth of the product portfolios helping the revenue size.

Christian D. Schwab - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC, Research Division

Analyst

Yes, and given your technology leadership and the increased adoption, particularly of 10 gig and accelerating potentially in 40, how big of a business do you believe that could be, David, in 2 to 3 years?

David Ginsburg

Analyst

Thank you for the question. The only thing I can reference are some of the third-party analysts, which would include Dell'Oro. Try to characterize the size of the 10, 40 and 100, the new 100-gigabit per second market where we have investments as well. I would say that over the course of time, our overall revenue should close -- should reach a closer approximation of what Dell'Oro is calling. And you've heard in the past, our statement that anywhere from 40% to 60% of the revenue in the outyears should come from higher bandwidth products. I agree with that prediction.

Christian D. Schwab - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC, Research Division

Analyst

Great, great. And then my last question, if I may, is how many existing customers do you have?

David Ginsburg

Analyst

At this time, we have over 6,000 customers in terms of -- that we serve direct through our channel partners or through our distribution channel.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Rohit Chopra of Wedbush Securities.

Sanjit Singh - Wedbush Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

This is Sanjit Singh sitting for Rohit. Chuck, welcome to the team. Just a couple of questions on the quarter. If you just characterize where -- were there any particular verticals on that sit out as being points of weakness? Do you have any federal exposure? It seemed like the overall IT spending environment was weak this quarter, so I'm trying to separate out what was more macro driven versus maybe more execution specific-type weakness.

Charles W. Berger

Analyst

Dave, why don't you take that from the market standpoint?

David Ginsburg

Analyst

Sure. So if we look at where we target the company and we've sort of mentioned this in the past. We have good traction, mid-market enterprise, education, not federal government, but we're actually pretty strong in some of the overseas government deployments. Those markets have held up for us. I would say that the data center market also was strong with the exception John mentioned, that some of the orders were backloaded and turned into the one to one, 1.1 book-to-bill ratio. But you're correct in that there's overall cautiousness in spending. And I think that was the one thing that was an overall dampener across all of the verticals, not necessarily made more visible in any specific vertical for Extreme Networks.

Sanjit Singh - Wedbush Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

I appreciate the answer. As it relates to looking at next quarter's guidance, John, what are you assuming there in terms of close rates? How cautious are you in terms of your assumptions regarding the pipeline? Just want to get a sense of how you're thinking about guidance given kind of the weaker macro backdrop?

John T. Kurtzweil

Analyst

In terms of weaker macro, the background on the environment into account when we look at this, what we saw was that we saw a higher book-to-bill ratio for this quarter, some business that was going to be carryover into next quarter. And that's how we came up with it. I think we're definitely cognizant that the environment is weak, but we are seeing a good -- and when we look at it, we're looking at a good pipeline of orders and products that we should be able to close on. So we're pretty comfortable within that range on revenue.

Charles W. Berger

Analyst

I would comment that I spent the better part of the day looking at our backlog, our pipeline against the forecast for the fourth quarter, and I'm used to typically at least 3x, if not larger, opportunities that could close in order to get to a number, and we're well within that range.

Sanjit Singh - Wedbush Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

That's great insight. I appreciate that. Last couple of questions here. Regarding the inventory shortages, what was -- was there any type of root causes behind that, or just a surprise in terms of what the customer requests were in terms of the products? And then, John, on the stock-based comp, is there any way you can break that out between the OpEx line items for, let's say, cost of product, cost of service and R&D, SG&A and sales and marketing?

John T. Kurtzweil

Analyst

Yes, I'll be able to break those out for you. And when we look at the inventory where the issue was, it came really with the -- some of the larger orders we thought we're going to get next in the fourth quarter, came in earlier than forecasted, which put a damper on our ability to shift. As you saw inventory was down, we filled what we could. And from that, we have a list of shortages that we're working, and we think we should have all the shortages alleviated by the middle of May. And then for the stock-based compensation, when I look at the split, just one second here, let me get to that.

Charles W. Berger

Analyst

I would add to the inventory business, we've worked very hard or the team has worked very hard prior to my arrival to managing our total asset base as closely as possible. When you do that, of course, you run the risk of last-minute orders not being fulfillable against the lower inventory levels, and that's also maybe something that we'll look at going forward as to where the healthy balance is there.

John T. Kurtzweil

Analyst

And then the split on the stock-based comp, there was about $200,000, and our cost of goods sold and R&D was about $300,000, about $0.8 million in sales and marketing, and about $0.6 million in G&A.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And at this time, I'm not showing any further questions. I'd like to turn the call back to Mr. Chuck Berger, CEO, for any further remarks.

Charles W. Berger

Analyst

Thanks, everyone, for joining us. I apologize that I'm not fully up to speed on the business yet after only a couple of days, but I assure you by the time that we talk again in this forum, I will have a much more complete view of the business and grip on questions that you may need answers to or want answers to, as well as where the key leverage points are in the business versus my initial expectations, and how we're actually performing against them in the fourth quarter. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this opportunity. As you probably read, I recently completed a successful sale of my prior company, ParAccel, which was just exploded into the market for big data in the high-end MPP database space. And although I probably would have been wiser to take a couple of weeks off, I just was chomping at the bit and couldn't wait to get here. So I'd literally announced that sale Thursday morning and was here at Extreme Thursday afternoon. I just think there are so many things that we can do even just a little bit better, and many we can do a lot better that will have dramatic leverage and dramatic impact. So I look forward to future calls. And with that, we'll end the call.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude today's program. You may all disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.